The Call I Made to My Brother First

“I already paid him. You’ll pay me.”

“I’ll pay you today.” He nodded hard. “And Greta. I’m going to tell Dad. What I did. All of it.”

I looked at him. “You don’t have to do that this morning.”

“Yes I do,” Bert said. “If I don’t do it this morning, I’ll never do it.”

Dad was sitting up a little when we came in, with the bed cranked partway and Ruthie fussing with his pillow. He looked at the two of us standing in the door together, and something in his face let go.

“Well,” he said. “There’s both of you.”

Bert went to him first. He bent down and put his forehead against Dad’s shoulder, very careful of the bandage, and stayed there. Dad got his good hand up and laid it on the back of Bert’s head, the way he did when we were small and had a fever.

Ruthie caught my eye and slipped out and pulled the curtain behind her.

I sat down in the chair on the other side of the bed. After a minute Dad reached over with his other hand and found mine.

We stayed like that a long time, the three of us. Nobody said a word. The monitor beeped. Somebody’s cart rattled down the hall. The window went from pink to gold.

Then Bert sat up and pulled the other chair close and told him.

He told him all of it. The six o’clock exit. The tool on his key ring. The caps stood up on the pavement. The consult alone. The truck. The whole night in the truck.

Dad listened with his eyes closed. When Bert finished, Dad did not say anything for so long that I thought he had fallen asleep.

Then he opened his eyes and looked at Bert.

“You let the air out of your sister’s tires,” he said.

“Yes sir.”

“In a hospital parking lot. In the dark. With the tool I gave you.”

“Yes sir.”

“And she paid a man six hundred dollars to haul her up here behind me.”

Bert’s jaw worked. “Yes sir. I’m paying her back today.”

“You’re paying her back today,” Dad agreed. He was quiet again. Then he said, “Your mother would have skinned you.”

“I know it.”

“I ought to.” He shifted against the pillow and winced. “Here’s what I’ll tell you both. I’m too old and too tired to skin anybody, and I’ve got a hole in my head.”

Bert laughed, wet. I did too.

“I put your name on that paper because you’re the oldest and you’re the calm one,” Dad said to Bert. “I put hers second because she’s the one who gets things done. I never meant for one of you to be in the room and one of you to be on the side of the road.”

He looked from one of us to the other.

“Next time there’s a decision about me,” he said, “both of you sit in that room. I don’t care whose name is first. Both of you, or nobody talks to the doctor. You hear me?”

“Yes sir,” Bert said.

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Greta,” he said. “Did you get all the air you needed out of him?”

I looked at my brother. He looked like a man who had been dragged a long way behind a truck. And he had sat in that lot all night rather than walk in past me, and he had carried those cores over his heart.